General Manager of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group Leaves Company

Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of ultra mobility group (UMG), announced on Monday that he will be leaving Intel to pursue other interests. The decision seems to be rather surprising as the executive has been involved into multiple crucial ultra mobility projects and only recently the UMG obtained a number of important assets needed for success of the low-power devices.

“Intel remains committed to this business. We continue to make the investments needed to ensure that the best user experience on smartphones and handhelds runs on Intel Architecture, and to ship a phone this year. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Anand for numerous contributions to Intel over his 24-year career here, and wish him well in his future endeavors,” said David Perlmutter, executive vice president and Intel architecture group (IAG) general manager.

Effective immediately, Mike Bell vice president of IAG and Dave Whalen vice president of IAG, will co-manage UMG.

The success of Intel UMG has been moderate to say at least. The company has been attempting to enter the market of smartphones and tablets (which were called mobile Internet devices several years ago) without much success for three years now. However, recently Intel acquired baseband technologies from Infineon AG and can now develop highly-integrated system-on-chip devices that are much more competitive on the market of mobile devices than standalone chips. Switching executives now may not be the best idea.

It is unclear whether Mr. Chandrasekher received business proposals at another company or left Intel for personal reasons.